Saturday, September 28, 2013

Statement by the Press Secretary

Today Republicans in the House of Representatives moved to shut down the government.Congress has two jobs to do: pass budgets and pay the bills it has racked up. Republicans in Congress had the opportunity to pass a routine, simple continuing resolution that keeps the government running for a few more weeks. But instead, Republicans decided they would rather make an ideological point by demanding the sabotage of the health care law. Republicans have tried and failed to defund or delay the health care law more than 40 times, and they know this demand is reckless and irresponsible. The President has shown that he is willing to improve the health care law and meet Republicans more than halfway to deal with our fiscal challenges, but he will not do so under threats of a government shutdown that will hurt our economy. Any member of the Republican Party who votes for this bill is voting for a shutdown. It's time for the House to listen to the American people and act, as the Senate has, in a reasonable way to pass a bill that keeps the government running and move on.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

"In fact, the elephant recognizes the language of his homeland, obeys orders, remembers what he learns, knows the passion of love and the ambition of glory, practices virtues “rare even among men,” such as probity, prudence and equity, and has a religious veneration for the sun, the moon, and the stars."From “Man, the sky and the elephant” pp. 315-330 of The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1986.

An Open Letter to the Chief Executive Officer of NBCUniversal

Dear Stephen Burke,

As Chief Executive Officer of NBCUniversal you oversee the vast and important array of news, sports and entertainment networks that make NBCUniversal a leader in global media. In many ways the world looks to you and NBCUniversal for not just entertainment but inspiration. With this in mind, it comes as a visceral shock to me that in a recent episode of Under Wild Skies, a man with a weapon shot pointblank and brutally killed an African elephant on television on your NBC Sports Network. In agonizing detail your film crew documented the suffering animal's futile attempts to run free and its unfortunate demise at the hands of a human with a gun. Do the values of NBC really fall in line with this type of programming? The tracking, hunting, and killing of an endangered species does not fall under anyone's rational definition of entertainment or sport. In almost every country across the globe killing an elephant is illegal and would guarantee a lengthy prison sentence. With this in mind I request that NBC cancel Under Wild Skies and help protect threatened wildlife around the world by supporting responsible wildlife conservation in your programming.

Friday, September 13, 2013

by Gregg Chadwick"As every cell in Chile will tell, the cries of the tortured men. Remember Allende in the days before, before the army came. Please remember Víctor Jara, in the Santiago Stadium. Es Verdad, those Washington Bullets again."-fromWashington Bullets, The Clash - 1980"And in the world a heart of darkness, a fire zone. Where poets speak their heart, then bleed for it. Jara sang, his song a weapon, in the hands of love. Though his blood still cries from the ground."- fromOne Tree Hill, U2 - 1987

In Santiago, on the 40th anniversary of the CIA backed coup in Chile, Bruce Springsteen gave homage to Chilean poet and activist Víctor Jara by performing Jara's poignant song Manifiesto. The 1973 Chilean coup ushered the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet into power and marked the beginning of a bloody era in Chile. Thousands of people were arrested, tortured and killed by the military.In Philip Sherwell's must read interview in The Telegraph - Joan Jara,Víctor's widow, recounts their last phone conversation on the afternoon of Sept 11, 1973:"Victor called me to say that he couldn't get home because of the curfew, that he loved me and urged me to stay home and take care of the girls," she said. "What he didn't tell me was that he couldn't leave because the university was surrounded by tanks and under siege."From a smuggled message, Joan Jara was informed that Víctor was among 800 students and faculty members taken from Santiago's Technical University on September 12, 1973 to Estadio Chile (Chile Stadium) where thousands were being held by the Pinochet government.

Many of those detained were tortured and killed by Pinochet's shock troops. Víctor's captors brutally beat him, smashing his hands with rifle butts and then, according to fellow prisoners, the guards mockingly suggested that Víctor play guitar for them with his battered hands. Defiantly, Víctor sang part of Venceremos (We Will Win), a song supporting deposed President Allende's Popular Unity coalition.

September 1973 - Estadio Chile (Chile Stadium)

Jose Paredes, one of Víctor's captors recently recounted in court how he and other soldiers from his regiment witnessed their superior officer Lieutenant Barrientos torture Víctor Jara and other prisoners held in the arena. Paredes then describes Víctor's death:"After that, Lieutenant Barrientos decided to play Russian roulette, so he took out his gun, approached Víctor Jara, who was standing with his hands handcuffed behind his back, spun the cylinder, put it against the back of his neck and fired." Then Lieutenant Barrientos ordered his troops to follow up with a machine gun coup-de-grace. Víctor's bullet riddled body was dumped on a street outside Santiago. A few months later in New York, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs headlined a benefit in honor of Jara's life and work.

Joan Jara managed to escape from Chile to London with their two daughters and a number of Víctor's literary and musical works, including a poem Víctorwrote while imprisoned in Estadio Chile. Víctor's last untitled, unfinished work is a cry for hope amid brutality and injustice.

Joan spent the next 10 years travelling the world bearing witness to the brutal coup in Chile, eventually moving back to Santiago in 1983. Joan established the VíctorJara Foundation to keep her husband's memory and artistic legacy alive and she continues to fight relentlessly to gain justice for him in death.

"In 1988 we played for Amnesty International in Mendoza, Argentina, but Chile was in our hearts. We met many families of desaparecidos, which had pictures of their loved ones. It was a moment that stays with me forever. A political musician, Victor Jara, remains a great inspiration. It's a gift to be here and I take it with humbleness."

Springsteen and the E Street Band followed up Manifiesto with We Are Alive, off of his latest album Wrecking Ball.The final track on Wrecking Ball, We Are Alive, is a folk hymn that weaves together death, sacrifice, memory, and transcendence. The songopens with the sound of a record needle scratching across vinyl - a nostalgic warmth that conjures up the history of recorded music. The sounds of We Are Alive bring us from Edison's wax cylinders, to vinyl LP's, to digital tracks. The words of We Are Alive lead us through the history of the struggle for human rights in the United States. Like a folk spirit cut loose from Dicken's A Christmas Carol, the singer of We Are Alive touches down in three stages of our country's life: the historical past of the 19th century, the recent past of 1960's Civil Rights era, and the contemporary reality of new immigrants trying to reach this land of promise. On September 12, 2013 in Santiago, Chile - We Are Alive also connectedto global injustice and Nixon era America's brutal sins abroad. Víctor Jara's life and music continue to inspire resistance and revolution. Jara'sNueva Canción (New Song) continues to be sung in Latinoamérica and across the globe.

I don't sing for love of singing, or because I have a good voice. I sing because my guitar has both feeling and reason. It has a heart of earthand the wings of a dove, it is like holy water, blessing joy and grief.My song has found a purposeas Violeta would say. Hardworking guitar, with a smell of spring.

My guitar is not for the rich no, nothing like that. My song is of the ladder we are building to reach the stars. For a song has meaning when it beats in the veins of a man who will die singing, truthfully singing his song.

My song is not for fleeting praise nor to gain foreign fame, it is for this narrow country to the very depths of the earth.

There, where everything comes to rest and where everything begins, the song which has been brave will be forever new.

(Many thanks to Salvdor Trepat at Point Blank for lyrics and translation.)

Víctor Jara - Chile Stadium (his last song) English translation

Translated by Joan Jara. Read by Adrian Mitchell. From the album Manifiesto.

Santa Monica-based artist Gregg Chadwick has been painting for three decades. His current studio is an old airplane hangar where the flurry of takeoffs and landings on the runway outside seems to creep into Chadwick’s paintings as he explores movement and travel within his light-filled paintings. His current series of paintings is entitled ‘Mystery Train’ and evokes the railways of America that Chadwick says run in his blood. His grandfather worked as a fireman, stoking coal in steam engines before advancing to train engineer on the Jersey Central Line. Chadwick often says that family gatherings brought the rhythms of the rails home. The sounds of railroad workers echoed in the music that Chadwick’s relatives played in the shadows of the train lines outside. For Chadwick and many others such as writer Greil Marcus, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and musicians Junior Parker and Elvis Presley, the enduring mythos of America and its legacy is wrapped in the blues notes of the song ‘Mystery Train’

Chadwick's thoughts on the intersection of art, culture, and politics can be found on his blog, Speed of Life.

Chadwick's flickr page which is often updated with new finished paintings and work in progress is at: